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From Our Own Correspondent

Panic in Beirut

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kate Adie introduces dispatches from Lebanon, Poland, The Gambia, Panama and Cyprus.

Lebanon is reeling from this week’s wave of exploding pager attacks, which killed more than 35 people, and injured hundreds more. Edmund Bower was in capital as the first news of the explosions began to spread, and reveals how the attacks has compounded the unease that already permeates Beiruti society.

Flooding has devastated parts of Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Austria this week leaving more than 20 people dead. Sarah Rainsford reports from Poland on the country's worst flooding in two decades.

Female Genital Mutilation is classified as a human rights abuse by the UN, but a recent bill in The Gambia sought to overturn a ban on the practice. Reporting with The Pulitizer Foundation, Sira Thierij visited a community where activists were working hard to change the minds of locals hanging on to long-held cultural beliefs.

Panama’s weather is hot, sticky and tropical – and it's causing a stink among the country's unattended rubbish piles. It was a particular problem for prisoners and prison guards at a local jail - until one inmate came up with an innovative solution. Jane Chambers went to find out more.

And it's 50 years since the war which divided Cyprus and the subsequent negotiations to reunify the island have ended in stalemate. Meanwhile the landscape of this popular holiday island is being remade by developers – though Maria Margaronis met one woman with a different vision for its future.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

0:05.3

Hello. Today we hear about the impact of Storm Boris in the aftermath of flooding

0:11.5

across Central Europe, including Poland, where an entire city was

0:16.5

evacuated.

0:18.4

In the Gambia, we hear how an attempt to overturn a ban on FGM was narrowly averted, in part thanks to some open and frank discussion.

0:29.6

We go to a recycling plant in Panama that's being run out of a prison and tell the story of the

0:36.3

ex-prisoner who was the mastermind behind the idea. And finally we're in Cyprus 50 years on from the partition of the island.

0:45.6

But first to Lebanon which is still reeling from the wave of exploding pager attacks

0:51.8

which killed at least 37 people and injured hundreds more.

0:57.1

The attack targeted devices used by members of the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah detonating from Beirut to the Becca Valley to

1:06.5

parts of Syria. It's added to the constant feeling of our knees in the country racked

1:12.3

by ongoing political and economic instability,

1:16.0

as well as the conflict in Gaza.

1:19.0

It's the worst security breach in Hezbollah's history which has blamed Israel for the attack.

1:25.0

Israel has yet to comment, but subsequently launched an

1:29.8

airstrike that

1:35.0

the killed over 30 people, including top Hezbollah commanders.

1:36.0

Edmund Barr was in the Lebanese capital Beirut

1:39.0

as news of the first explosions began to spread. Within half an hour of the first explosions began to spread.

1:43.0

Within half an hour of the first reports that some handheld pages

1:47.0

had spontaneously exploded in the southern suburbs of Beirut,

1:51.0

we heard the sirens.

...

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